


Lessons in morality

by Sapphy, SapphyWatchesYouSleep (Sapphy)



Series: Becoming Sherlock Holmes [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Childhood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-27
Updated: 2011-08-27
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:17:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/Sapphy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/SapphyWatchesYouSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock can't understand why normals worry so much about silly things like goodness and morality. And what happened to next door's cat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lessons in morality

**Author's Note:**

> Just another of my drabbles about what kind of family and environment could have created Sherlock. Not beta'd unless you count Office spell-check, but I don't think it's too bad.

Sherlock threw himself into a sofa with his usual disregard for the safety of people or objects around him. At thirteen he had begun the irregular growth spurts of adolescence and seemed to have next to no control over his own limbs. Except of course when attempting some dangerous stunt like climbing the outside of the house, when he exhibited the grace of a cat.

“If I killed someone, what would happen?” he asked.

His mother didn’t answer straight away. She took a moment to ensure the point she had reached in her equation was fixed firmly in her mind, so that later she would be able to return to the problem without the slightest difficulty. Then she surveyed her youngest son.

Like all Holmeses she had little affection or patience for regular humans, but she could read people effortlessly. This was, she decided quickly after observing her curly haired son, simply an academic question. She let out a small sigh of relief.

“You thought I’d done it,” Sherlock said, intrigued. For a moment she was thrown of balance. He had taken so much longer to develop the skill than his brother that she sometimes forgot that he too could do what Mycroft as a child had christened Body Reading. “But when you saw I hadn’t you were pleased. And the first thing Mycroft asked when I saw him was whether I’d killed anyone. I don’t understand.”

Leticia wondered how she could possibly explain the concepts of right and wrong to her troubled son. She herself had worked them out in fits and starts, guided by disasters rather than a gentle maternal hand. Mycroft had asked her to explain when he was seven and had immediately dismissed them as, “useful to know, but not relevant to me.” Had he been any other child she might have worried, but Mycroft had probably the most brilliant mind she had ever encountered, for all that he didn’t see or appreciate the beautiful patterns and colours made by numbers. She knew she didn’t have to worry about him being caught, and unlike Sherlock, he had no propensity for casual violence or cruelty. He understood and manipulated all the people round him except his immediate family, and in the case of his father at least, that was simply a courtesy.

Sherlock, she thought, wasn’t quite normal when it came to other people, even allowing for his being a Holmes. She was sometimes annoyed by ordinary humans, but mostly she simply didn’t think about them. To all intents and purposes they were a separate species who just happened to live on the same planet. They made no sense, but they were different and if one ignored them, they generally went away.

Mycroft’s views weren’t quite so humanitarian, regarding people as tools to be used, or pieces in the great game he played against the world. But on the other hand unless they were useful to him, he didn’t think about them at all, and like her, expected them to extent the same courtesy.

Sherlock on the other hand hated them and resent their dominance of their shared planet. She had restrained him with gentle guidance thus far, but she always worried that one day the anger would boil over and he would lash out with more than fists or words. That one day he would commit a murder.

Murder was his obsession. His interest though was not in seeing justice done, or helping victims. He enjoyed the puzzle, and he gained a kind of sick satisfaction in knowing another of the rival species had been removed. Sherlock liked the murderers far more than the victims.

“If you killed someone you would be found out. Either you would be sloppy and the normals would find out the truth, or Mycroft or I would. And then you would be locked away for the rest of your life with nothing to do and no puzzles to solve or crimes to investigate.”

“But why? I know why the normals would lock me up. By why would you and Mycroft lock me up? You know I’d never hurt you. And I’d make sure the normals never found out so your reputation wouldn’t be harmed!”

How, she wondered, did you explain morality to someone who saw the world in purely logical terms?

Mycroft pushed open the door then, moving into the room so silently that only his family or a ninja would have known he was there. He did not ask, as a normal might have done, what they were talking about. Instead he examined their faces intently, reading what he wanted to know straight from their bodies.  
“Killing people is almost always wrong,” she told her son firmly. She had learnt early on that if she made an absolute statement which Sherlock later found to be wrong in some circumstances, he would dismiss it utterly. “It should always be avoided where possible.”

“But why?” Sherlock wailed, not able to understand why his normally logical mother was suddenly making no sense.

“Not everything has to make sense, little brother,” Mycroft said from his crossed legged perch on the desk. He like sitting on furniture, especially if it put him higher than the others in the room. “Sometimes what matters isn’t whether you get caught, but what you do.”

“Like the bird?” Sherlock asked. He resented his brother for being better with people and possessing an inner calm which he knew he could never have, and for being his parent’s favourite, but it was Mycroft he turned too when he needed advice, more often even than his mother. She was brilliant, and had the benefit of experience, but even she didn’t understand people the way Mycroft did.

“Exactly like the bird,” Mycroft confirmed solemnly. ‘The bird’ Leticia knew was the brothers code name for the time Mycroft found Sherlock ‘testing the nervous system’ of a blackbird, using a toffee hammer and a box of matches. Sherlock had never been able to understand what was wrong with that – after all no one by Mycroft and Mummy had found out.

“There’s a concept in theology,” Mycroft told his brother (he was studying PPE naturally, but attended the lectures of almost every other discipline in his spare time), “which is called the golden rule. It’s supposed to appear in every religion in the world. That is not true, but if you asked a cross section of normals to explain good and morality, the answer you got would be more or less the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  
Leticia could see some flaws with encouraging Sherlock to adopt this as his personal motto – the things we wanted done unto him where frequently hair-raising – but she agreed with her elder son that of the options, this was the creed Sherlock would best understand.

“Remember we discussed that the way you treat other people will change how they treat you?” Leticia asked. Sherlock nodded. “Well this is like that. Most of the time, if you want people to ignore you and let you get on with your life, you ignore them and let them get on with their lives. If you want them to like you and be nice, you must be nice to them.”

“So it’s a way of controlling people?” Sherlock asked, and Leticia was reminded how much of his education had come from Mycroft.

“It’s a way of controlling some of the variables in your environment,” Mycroft answered smoothly. For all his own love of power, he foresaw the difficulties of Sherlock gaining control over normals.

“You don’t want the normals to treat you like an inhuman criminal and lock you up,” Leticia said, “so you don’t go around murdering people.”

“Even if I know I’d never be caught by them. Maybe not even by Mycroft?” Sherlock asked, his eyes wide with confusion.

“Even then.” This tack didn’t seem to be working so she tried another. “The normals don’t like us Sherlock. We don’t like them. We’re cleverer than them, but there’s a lot more of them, and so long as we live quietly, they don’t wish us harm.”

“You’d probably never be caught,” drawled Mycroft still perched on the furniture, “but why take the risk? Besides which you know I’m taking over the country and I can’t have my little brother running round confusing my plans by killing people. I’d have to stop you, and you know you can’t hide from me.”  
Mycroft was the only person on the planet who could out plot Sherlock. It wasn’t just that Mycroft was cleverer than Sherlock, though not by much, it was Mycroft’s steady patience matched against brother’s butterfly mind.

“So killing people is wrong but you can’t explain why in logical terms and if I did commit murder Mycroft would find me and lock me up,” Sherlock said, looking seriously at his mother and elder brother.

“Exactly,” Leticia said, hoping this would be enough to satisfy him.

Sherlock nodded. “Alright I won’t, unless I get really really really bored,” he announced, and sloped of to do whatever it was he did.

Mycroft and Leticia both made mental notes to do all they could to keep him amused.


End file.
